Award Tour
Let me start by saying that this is a wholly unnatural experience for me. Sure, in the course of my career, I have experienced winning team and individual awards. Those experiences were nominally interesting. They typically happened at big internal events, good job former leaders. I (possibly mistakenly) never really saw awards as a big thing, though. By the way: I love nostalgic popular culture references and am a huge fan of Adam Grant. The title of this article is a total ripoff of the title of an awesome song by A Tribe Called Quest from 1993.
A New Experience
If you are a sports ball enthusiast, you might have seen a particularly successful individual athlete ascend into a coaching or managerial role within their sport. Think of guys like Steve Kerr, a champion in his career who went on to be a champion in his coaching career. Or maybe Cael Sanderson, another relevant example, perhaps more so in the case of individual versus leadership/team achievement. Cael is known for going 159–0 in his collegiate wrestling career, winning four national titles and even an Olympic gold medal. Can you think of a greater height of personal achievement? Cael went on to start a coaching career that does not have that ‘and zero’ record. If I were a betting man, and I am, in spite of the amazing personal accomplishment, my bet is the leadership and mentorship has grown to be more rewarding.
Historically, while receiving awards, I let the moment pass. I try my best to be humble. If someone recognizes that I have achieved something, that’s an achievement in itself. My drive pushes me to move on to the next thing, often sacrificing reveling or promoting any personal success to go solve a new problem. As a leader within a company, my perspective needs to change, drastically.
2021 Colonel Bradford W. Parkinson U.S. Space Force Innovation Award
No awards for ‘most succinct award title’ here. Let’s start with a little background information. For 21 years, Silicon Mountain has provided human-centric technologies services to enterprise customers that have problems with siloed data solutions, change management, basically the whole cookbook of things that can make a solution ineffective or stagnant. Just prior to COVID, we started hanging out with some cool people in Colorado Springs at Space CAMP and Platform One. One thing lead to another and we ended up dating full time. We were able to bring not only the company’s experience, but bring on new experts that add to perspectives and capabilities. Want to read the official announcement? You can find that here.
Let me start by giving HUGE gratitude and props to the government teams at Space Launch Delta 45 that leaned into innovating their risk management and loss prevention processes. There are many uniformed officers, federal civilians, and even a peer contractor from Mantech that helped make the success behind the innovation recognition possible. So many of these people put aside differences and invested their time and their careers in a mission-focused series of solutions that pull the space launch ecosystem forward. This is an example of the right behavior, not to be mistaken for the only or permanent solution. There are many people not named on the award that make this a total team win, but there is only so much space on any plaque.
Later this week, my friends and peers at Silicon Mountain, Lisa Bongiovanni and Ryan Riker will be on site at the AFA (Air Force Association) Warfare Symposium in Orlando, FL at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort. The formal award ceremony will take place there and we our team will be well represented at the ceremony.
In addition to the great work of our team and the military’s resources, a couple of product companies really deserve credit for working hard to make sure the Department of Defense has options to solve modern problems without recreating the wheel each time. Atlassian, an Australian company, has invested decades in building a versatile set of workflow management and reporting tools. Those tools drive the government’s activities and are built in a way that enables usability out of the box for many early adopters. For those who are intimidated, training and documentation are readily available.
Also, Mattermost invested in building a secure chat tool that is more than a chat tool. They are investing in other interesting technologies like video teleconferencing, incident response playbooks, and even lightweight task management. There are a lot of amazing ways Mattermost is leveraged, including more real-time communications about launch status within the government. Before moving to this solution, people were dependent on VPN and being on a distribution list. Now you can self-subscribe without tracking down an admin, and the message can be controlled by administrators to reduce reply-all chatter. This might sound ridiculous, but imagine the time wasted when a director of operations misses a critical update simply because he or she cannot get that message directly to their device. Not everyone has two cell phones, nor should it be necessary.
Key Takeaways
Being sincerely humble and intently focused on the mission is good. But to Dr. Grant’s credit, if no one understands or acknowledges the impact of your work, we could easily be overshadowed by status quo operations or for territorial fiefdoms to continue to thrive. By acknowledging the behavior as the victory, I think we are striking a balance where validation and promotion are not a problem.
Personally, this moment is of greater pride than anything I achieved personally. Mostly because it is less about me and more about the behavior of success and the success of a whole team that is battling to be innovative in the face of a lot of challenges. I am sincerely proud of our team and excited to see what we can do next. Please celebrate another chalk mark in the win column for effective innovation.
